The Evolutionary Origins of Volition

It's generally believed that cognition is a distributed
process as in Brooks' Subsumption
Architecture or Dennett's
Multiple
Drafts theory, as well as in other theories of consciousness and
cognition. If this is the
case, how did we
evolve what appears to be the centralized control and descision system
known as volition? Is our volition just an illusion? Wayne
Christensen argues that it is not an illusion in a newly
released paper (PDF format) that will be a chapter in a forthcoming
MIT book. He proposes selective pressures operating in evolution,
favoring distributed systems with an executive control system
that achieves coherent focus and
resolves conflicts among competing subsystems. There are some useful
ideas here that apply to mobile robotics and artificial intelligence.